Recovering jumbled documents.

My cousin recently dropped off a computer at my house with a problem I thought I could fix. He had installed a bootleg copy of Windows XP and in the process had lost all of his final papers for his college classes. I restored the computer to ME and downloaded a file recovery program to attempt to recover the lost papers. The program found several of the papers, but I opened them to find jarbled text and random characters. Is there anyway to recover the body text of these files?

Depends how you extracted them, different programs get different results, and of course you need to have the program that opens them. Are you sure that you are opening them with the right extension. Try renaming them to like *.doc or *.txt. Drop them into notepad and see what you get. Ask him what he used to type them, it could be an easy fix. You could also try and use winhex http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/index-m.html and go in for raw retrival, but its a long strange trip. He also may have converted to NTFS? So you may need to look at that.

If you want and they are small, you could PM me and I will give you an mail addy and you could zipthem and mail them to me, I can read about anything. But its iffy, If I actually had the drive, good chance I could pull the files intact.